Three experiments are proposed for investigating the circumstances under which infants can accomplish visual-tactual mathcin--i.e., can determine whether or not an object they see is the same as one they feel. Previous research has yielded inconsistent findings regarding whether young infants are capable of cross-modal matching. In this application, it is argued that certain characteristics of the objects involved influence the performance of infants on cross-modal tasks, by interacting with infants' patterns of exploration and the cognitive operations presumed to underly cross-modal matching. The proposed experiments, each of them focused on the role of a particular stimulus characteristic, are designed to support this argument. In one study, the preferential-looking procedure will be used to investigate whether stimulus familiarity facilitates early cross-modal matching. Infants will be offered a visual choice between two highly familiar objects, one of which is identical to an object they have handled beneath an opaque cloth. Whether or not the infants look preferentially toward the matching stimulus will be observed. In another study, the violation-of-expectancy paradigm will be used to investigate how the similarity of the objects involved affects the performance of infants on a cross-modal task. Infants will be confronted with visual-tactual discrepancies involving pairs of objects similar to and different from one another in selected ways, and whether the various discrepancies are differentially detected will be assessed. In the third study, the familiarization-novelty test procedure will be used to investigate whether infants can learn arbitrary visual-tactual correspondences. Infants will be familiarized with particular pairings of color and temperature and then offered a new pairing--a recombination--of the same attributes. Whether or not the infants respond to the recombination as novel will be observed. The results of these studies will help to unify the current literature on infant visual-tactual matching and will provide further evidence concerning the origin and development of this important perceptual activity.